A fantastic and philosophical vision of the apocalypse by one of the most striking Italian novelists of the twentieth century.
Guido Morselli (1912-1973) was a novelist and essayist. After
serving in the Italian Army, he began writing reportages and short
stories while living abroad. He wrote several works of fiction,
among themPast Conditional, Divertimento 1889, and Roman senza papa
(Rome Without the Pope), though none were published during his
lifetime. NYRB Classics published his novel The Communist in
2017.
Frederika Randall (1948-2020) was a writer, reporter, and
translator. Among her translations are Ippolito Nievo's Confessions
of an Italian, and for NYRB, Guido Morselli's The Communist. She
received the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship
for Translation and the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, and with
Sergio Luzzatto, the Cundill Prize. She finished her translation of
Dissipatio H.G. shortly before her death in Rome in 2020.
“Given the narrator’s—and Morselli’s—views on contemporary society
and its endless efforts to eliminate all kinds of earthly friction,
one may even read this end of the world as a kind of collective
wish fulfillment. One of the questions Morselli seems to have had
on his mind is: How alive was everyone in the first place? . . .
the echoes one finds in “Dissipatio H.G.” of life during the
coronavirus pandemic are, at times, so glaring that some passages
read like thinly fictionalized versions of the present. Apocalyptic
fiction is often disinterred amid catastrophes, either for their
prescience or because they are paradoxically reassuring. Each phase
of the quarantine seems represented in this slim novel . . .
Morselli is drawn to anticlimaxes, resisting drama at every turn,
and it is this instinct that makes his final book so resonant with
certain experiences of the past year.” —Alejandro Chacoff, The
New Yorker
“Just as Morselli, tragically overlooked in his lifetime, was
destined to be hailed as one of contemporary Italy’s most
iconoclastic writers, so was this novel, his last, destined to be
translated, at the end of her long and distinguished career, by
Frederika Randall. I can think of few works of literature more
appropriate for our acutely isolating and endangered times.”
—Jhumpa Lahiri
“I recently had a chance to read a wonderful book, Dissipatio H.G.,
written by an Italian, Guido Morselli, who subsequently killed
himself. I think it would make a highly interesting subject for a
film, and you would certainly be the ideal director.” —Letter from
Marcello Mastroianni to Andrei Tarkovsky
“This is a powerful, erudite meditation on existence and the terror
of loneliness.” —Publishers Weekly
“Caustic, lonely and obsessive, the novel offers a richly
speculative portrait of early Anthropocene resignation.” —Dustin
Illingworth, The New York Times
"It has been oddly comforting these past few weeks to read a novel
about living in total isolation after an inexplicable,
catastrophic event causes the entirety of Earth’s population—save
for one very concerned narrator—to vanish... a useful reminder
that things can always get worse . . . In essayistic digressions
that voluptuously condemn the decadence of modern civilization . .
. Morselli makes the case for himself as a cantankerous shared
relation of Huysmans and Houellebecq." —Andrew Martin,
Harper's Magazine
“[Translator Frederika Randall had] a deep knowledge of Italian,
and a keen ear for the rhythms and tones of English. . . .
Dissipatio H.G. is, like many postapocalyptic stories, a
philosophical novel, a work of social criticism, a corrective to
our anthropocentrism. . . . Morselli’s many images of the natural
world in transition—ironic post-human pastorals—lose none of their
haunting vividness in Randall’s versions.” —Geoffrey Brock, The New
York Review of Books
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